Yule Ball, I'm Begging
by Lor-tan
Summary: Jamie Potter is the demon girl of Gryffindor, and has the determination to match her reputation. Indigo Evans is a prefect who doesn't really have the time, or mental strength, to deal with her, nor her apparent mission to take him to the Yule Ball. Genderbent James/Lily, Warning for bad haikus and blackmailing with puppies.


"Hey Evans! Wanna go to the Yule Ball with me?" It was a call that had become increasingly common the last couple of days. At meals, in the hallways, in the Gryffindor common rooms, yelled in the middle of history class... suffice to say, Indigo Evans was not impressed.

This was the first time they'd been yelled in the library though. Judging by the expression on the librarian's face, it had better be the last.

Hazel eyes stared at him from across the room, and Jamie Potter tilted up her chin. Indigo wasn't sure whether it was meant to be seductive, or a challenge. Either way, it failed.

"No." He stated as flatly as he could, before looking down to his book. Across from him, he could hear Severus muffle a laugh.

* * *

The letter on his desk was immediately suspicious. Mainly because of the hearts doodled on it.

Indigo had gotten his fair share of love letters over the years, to both his and pretty much every other male student's surprise. He didn't think he was exactly good looking, so much as that some of his features really made him stand out. His hair was brighter than a Weasley, and according to Severus, his eyes were greener than a Doxie's intestines. He tried not to think about how his best friend had discovered that astounding resemblance. As a result, he was easy to pick out of a lineup of the boys in his class, even if he didn't often put much concern into his appearance like some others. (Cough cough Lucius Malfoy.) Being a prefect didn't help.

Still... due to the surprisingly elegant yet girly font of his name on the front, not to mention the avid and determined look Potter was giving him from across the classroom, where she sat literally surrounded by attractive boys with far more money than he who she was already good friends with, he had a pretty good idea who it was from.

Opening it only proved his concerns to be true. Out came a small dusting of glittery pink pixie dust, and what was possibly intended to be a haiku stared up at him:

_You're so nice and tall_

_Your eyes greener than seaweed_

_Yule Ball, I'm begging._

There was also a surprisingly good cartoonish drawing of Potter holding her hands up in the universal praying/begging gesture.

He crumpled it and tossed it over his shoulder, before flicking his wand to send it careening towards her face, listening to the ensuing cry of dismay with a slight smile.

* * *

Of all the hair-brained, foolish, imbecilic plots to gain his attention so far, Indigo had to say that this was the most impressive, embarrassing, and generally ridiculous one so far.

"Well?" Potter asked, from where she kneeled on the floor in front of her.

He'd known he should have just skipped dinner and ate in the kitchens that day. She'd been getting increasingly desperate in her attempts as of late, as the date of the ball crept closer. He'd known that, known he should start avoiding her like the plague before she did something they'd both regret, but no, no he'd thought, he was a Gryffindor. he was supposed to be _brave. _He couldn't hide from some spoiled brat. He had a right to eat wherever he wanted, free of fear.

And now Jamie Potter was on her knees, offering him a _puppy_ in front of the whole Great Hall. Where she had even gotten the poor thing was beyond him. Merlin, had she smuggled in a _puppy_? Who _did_ that?

"I- how- wh-" Bloody hell, he couldn't even form words adequate enough to describe his sheer _I cannot_-ness on the matter presented before him.

Hundreds of eyes were focused on him. Other students, teachers, Sev's, Potter's, and... a puppy's.

Shit, it was giving him the puppy eyes.

For that matter, so was Potter.

He sighed, and buried his face in his hands, counting carefully to ten and taking deep breaths, before he even dared to look up again.

"You- fine! I will go to the ball with you." He finally said, internally wincing as the full brunt of what he had just said caught up with him. Oh, Lord, how was he going to survive this?

Potter, on the other hand, looked five milliseconds away from exploding into rainbows and sparkles.

Indigo just barely managed to rescue the puppy from her nightmarish clutches before she blew.

* * *

"So... Are you really going to do this?" Severus asked later that night, just before they parted for curfew.

Indigo didn't even need to ask him to clarify. He just groaned, and fought the urge to bang his head against the nearest wall. "Yes! Unfortunately. Ugh, I can't believe she would stoop so low as to use an innocent little puppy as blackmail. She's such a- a-"

"Bitch?" Severus supplied.

"A... toerag. She is an arrogant little toerag, scraped from the dredges of society and given the illusion that she can get whatever she wants." Indigo says instead, ignoring the fact that she apparently _could_. "Merlin, what did I ever do to deserve this? Why does she like _me?"_

Sev just grinned at him, and patted his shoulder with fake sympathy before leaving him.

* * *

It was here. The night was here.

Indigo straightened the tie Lupin had lent him, and reluctantly left the dorm room, giving the puppy a parting pat on its head as he passed its makeshift crate.

What? It wasn't like he could have let it go back to whatever black market hole in the ground Potter had produced it from, not after all that it had been through. No, that puppy was safest with him.

Almost immediately after emerging, he was set upon.

"Merlin's pants! Indie! You look hot!" A deceptively sweet sounding female voice yelled, even though Potter was literally two feet away and there was no reason whatsoever to yell when there was already plenty of noise in the common room. "Wait... is that Remmy's tie? Ah, nevermind! Damn though do you pull off those green robes or what?" The demon of a girl commented as she wrapped her hands around his arm, beaming up at him like this was the single greatest accomplishment of her life.

She looked... surprisingly good, considering that her outfit consisted of sparkly black robes, muggle trainors, and a decently sized collection of bracelets sporting the name of some band he'd never even heard of. Her hair even looked like it had been brushed since the last blue moon, and there was some sort of silver, sparkly contraption holding some of it back.

The silver pendant around her neck, engraved "Daddy's Girl" broke the illusion of rationality, of course, but he was reluctantly impressed by the fact that she had gotten so close.

She looked almost... He refused to think the word.

* * *

It was ten minutes into the night and nothing had gone catastrophically wrong yet. It was starting to put Indigo on edge.

He was sitting at a table full of Gryffindor's biggest idiots, (excluding Lupin of course) with no Severus in sight to provide backup. It felt like the calm before the storm. He was actually looking forward to it all going south and something exploding, just because then at least he wouldn't have to deal with the suspence.

Good Merlin, what had happened to him? Just ten minutes with Potter and her mob had him praying for chaos to occur.

"Indie!" A voice other than Potter's called sweetly, and he turned to raise an eyebrow at Black.

"Yes?" He might have tacked Siri onto the end, were he not certain that Black wouldn't actually mind.

"Well? Are you going to ask poor sweet Jam here to dance or not? Because otherwise I'll ask you to dance instead, and trust me, you do not want to deal with those sorts of rumors." Black told him, and winked at him, framing his face with his hands and batting his eyelashes.

_Ah_, thought Indigo. _There it is. There's the approaching tornado._

* * *

Three waltzes and one surprisingly successful foxtrot later, and Indigo was still alive, despite his original expectations of Potter's dancing abilities.

Unfortunately, his own personal stamina had not exceeded expections at all. Hence why he was currently crouching over two cups, one of water and one of punch, at the table occupied by Lupin and Pettigrew, as Potter attempted to steer Black away from other couples on the dance floor.

He was staring so deeply into the punch, trying to determine whether or not it had been spiked, that he nearly jumped out of his seat when Lupin reached over and tapped him on the shoulder.

When he looked up, both of Potter's friends were giving him that awful sort of smile, the kind he got when someone was going to try to pursuade him to do something for them.

"Hey, thanks for coming." Lupin said instead. Behind him, Pettigrew nodded almost frantically in apparent agreement. "She- Jamie, I mean, has been really excited about getting you to come with her since they announced the ball. When you said yes, I've never seen her look so happy."

"She was so excited about anything even resembling a date with you, I don't think she's slept since. She was mostly powered by coffee and chocolate these last few days." Pettigrew added on, smiling like what he had just said was a good thing, not a health hazard. "She drank three cups of hot chocolate just to figure out which dress to wear!"

Indigo just looked between them, and nodded, feeling a bit uncomfortable.

* * *

"Hey, Indie?" Potter asked, as they sat together watching Lupin and Pettigrew attempt to drag Sirius Black bodily off of the dance floor. It was quite the spectacle, but for the most part dancing couples were able to just swerve around the commotion.

It wasn't neccessarily that Black was a _bad_ dancer, so much as that he was just ridiculously flamboyant and possibly malicious towards passing Slytherin couples.

He nodded at her to signal to continue, not truly willing to speak or fully take his eyes off the glass of what was at this point definitely spiked punch. There was no other way to explain how content he was starting to feel.

"Why did you agree to come with me?"

That caught him a little off guard, and he found himself looking up to meet her eyes anyways. They were hazely brown, and the combination of eyeshadow and her glasses made them look huge. "What do you mean?" He asked, swallowing down the growing feeling in his throat and looking away again, this time to look over at the progress on the dance floor.

"Well. I've been asking you out literally every other day since second year, and you never said yes any of those times. I was just wondering why you did this time. Do you like me now, or did I annoy you into it, or do you just really like puppies? I'm fine if anything, I'm just glad you did, but still, I was wondering. 'Cuz, you know, if you just agreed for the puppy then there's more where that came from. I would get you all the puppies you want. I could be, like, your canine sugar daddy, if you wanted me to be."

"Actually, I agreed because I thought you were an endangerment to the puppy's life and just wanted to get it away from you."

"Wait, what?"

* * *

The clock was approaching midnight, and while Indigo was perfectly willing to stay up past three thirty in the morning if it was for the sake of a good book, the same did not apply to social events.

Announcing this led to the following reactions, all made simultaneously:

"Aw, come on Indie! The night has only just begun! Fire whiskey hasn't even begun to be passed around yet!" From Black,

"Perfect! I was hoping to get a bit of extra reading in before going to sleep." From Remus, (Not just Lupin anymore.)

"Oh! Okay! Can I walk you to your dorm?" From Potter,

And "Hmm? Huh!?" From Pettigrew as he jerked awake.

* * *

The halls were well lit and filled with laughter as they headed back to the dorms. Black was skipping ahead after having realised that there was probably another party happening back in the common room, and a clearly exasperated Remus was half-supporting Pettigrew's weight as the smaller boy struggled to keep his eyes open. The sight of the group made Indigo smile, a tiny happy thing that just barely moved his lips, but couldn't be stopped.

This apparently inspired Potter, who had previously been trotting beside him, (he suddenly wondered how she even kept up with her friends when her legs were so short in comparison. He and Severus were the same size.) to lean lightly against him.

He let her, both because he didn't think it was worth the trouble of getting rid of her, and because some part of him was tired enough that he was starting to find her presence to _not_ be the most loathsome thing ever.

They made it almost all the way to the Fat Lady before she stopped walking, her hand on his arm halting him too. Up ahead, he saw Remus give them a quizzical and mildly accusing look before following Black through the portrait, Pettigrew pulled in after.

He looked back when Potter spoke.

"Hey," she asked quietly, dropping his arm to put her hand to her hip and stare him in the eye. "About the sugar daddy thing... I wasn't kidding. I had a really fun time tonight. You're really fun to be around Evans, and really smart, and really good looking too, which doesn't hurt. And you, um, you're brilliant at magic, and everyone likes you, even the teachers. And you're really nice to girls. So, like, if there's any way I can get you to spend time with me again, that'd be... well, great, really." She'd gathered volume along the way, and was now speaking normally, which for her meant slightly louder than a normal person but still quieter than a Wood at a Quidditch match. "So, is there any way I could convince you to, like, maybe go to the next Quidditch match with me, or something? Or, like, the Three Broomsticks? I'd pay for everything, of course. I mean I know the guy is supposed to but your family is muggle, not that there's anything wrong with muggles of course, and I'm rich anyways, and if you'd rather go someplace else then that's fine too I mean it's really up to you but just-"

She stopped rambling as he held up his hand, and he thanked Circe.

"Sure." His mouth said, completely without his mind's consent. Her eyes immediately lit up, and a smile so large it was slightly creepy exploded onto her face.

A slightly smaller, far more sane looking one found it's way onto his face too, much to his surprise.

There had definitely been something in that punch.

xXx

I would literally kill for a canine sugar daddy.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a review if it would please you, but don't feel pressured or anything of course. Flames especially are welcome. Um...byeeeeeeeeee!


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